While the new movie thriller "Outbreak" is a highly fictionalized adaptation of a real occurrence, it does illustrate the need forincreased attention to the whole area of "emerging diseases,"including AIDS and the Hantavirus, says Dr. Fred Murphy, dean of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. Murphy recalls with a chill the real 1989 outbreak that spawned the movie. A deadly virus appeared in a colony of imported research monkeys at a Virginia quarantine facility, and Murphy, then director of the National Center for Infectious Diseases at the Centers for Disease Control, became a major player in dealing with the viral outbreak. An authority on viruses, Murphy also was the first to capture with an electron microscope a picture of the "Ebola" virus, which caused hundreds of human deaths in the late 1970s during two African epidemics. The picture was used in the film "Outbreak" and hangs in Murphy's UC Davis office. Although six animal caretakers became infected with the virus during the 1989 incident, they never developed symptoms of the disease. Apparently the virus had mutated into a much more benign strain, deadly to monkeys but harmless to humans, says Murphy.